Oh, what a feeling

For the past three days and nights fierce wintry winds and rain, sleet and monstrous 26 foot waves pounded, still pound, relentlessly onto the cliffs and shoreline of Windgrove.

Over the weekend I ventured out with numbing fingers to photograph these waves as often as I could to capture the essence of their beauty and power, because even after living here for 19 years, their dramatic energy still captivates and fills me with wonderment and awe.

Looking at these waves now, as I write this blog, takes me back several years to when I poured myself into the essence of the elemental sea daily.

Yes, daily for 1212 days — that’s three years, three months, three weeks and three days — I went down to Roaring Beach to immerse myself into its sometimes gentle, sometimes wild waters. This was done, not so much to prove anything, but to learn and feel what, perhaps, women know intimately.

Click here to see a really big wave

Maybe what women still know through our biology — what we cannot help but know — is what modernity refuses to men; an undeniable resonance with the elemental sea. We are tidal in our moods and wombs, the high waters and low waters of mind and body. We are flux, salty blood, tears, tides, waves, ebbs and flows.

Jay Griffiths, ‘Wild’

If I were a man, I might also feel a kinship with the seas — and if I did, I’d relish it.

I know I am oceanic. I fathom it in other women too. I know we can speak at the shoreline and feel in our depths. I know we are pervasive. I know we have a capacity for empathy with others as if the seawater within us flows out through our permeable nature, not recognizing the boundaries of our own skin.

We dissolve, they say, into tears, as if that salty dissolution were a weakness. I cry easily, letting the inner sea out, with women or with ocean-minded men, and it is not weakness but expression; the sea expresses itself this way. And in our feral state we smell of the sea and we taste of the sea.

Jay Griffiths, ‘Wild’